I am getting very tired of reading Anti-Christ just about everywhere I look. There is no such person as the Anti-Christ. There is only The Christ. The word Anti-Christ occurs only once in the entire Bible and that is in the least canonical of all the books of the Bible; that is, it occurs in the book that had the most difficulty in becoming accepted into the Canon; and it is the one that least likely originated either with our Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth or with any of His Disciples. Jesus Christ came to this earth to bring tidings of good news. He did not come to produce an Anti-Christ or any other tidings other than the good news that a knowledge of Jesus Christ and His Father and the Holy Spirit means to the salvation of mankind. There always was an Anti-Christ. The real Anti-Christ is Satan, the devil, and that Fallen Angel whose grand scheme is to destroy God’s Great Creation by winning over as much of the Kingdom of God as he can and to establish his own kingdom of Hell to the doom of mankind created by God. The Anti-Christ is not God. He is not even a god, but a fallen angel whom God created. He was created by God, but he fell from Grace through excessive ambition and greed, who can not create a Kingdom of his own; therefore, in order to satisfy his ambition, he must steal one that has already been created by deceit, by greed, and by subterfuge. The entire premise of the Bible is a revelation of the story of the progress of mankind’s ability to escape the clutches of this fallen angel and remain faithful to the true Creator by living a life that God, Our Maker, originally intended for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. So, there are many new leaders in the world today. Sure! Things are looking bad to mere man who is looking at the world as though looking at the world through very dark glasses with an incomplete understanding. Only God can know the real extent of the worldly condition because only God knows the true condition of the heart of man. The best that we can do is to make the best decision we can with the knowledge and the understanding that we have, accept the consequences, and hope for a better future for all mankind and the world we live in.

For your information, the Epistle of First John and the Epistle of Second John are the exact two books of the Bible that had the most difficulty in gaining acceptance into the Canon. These two books almost didn’t make it at all. All of the first councils of the Church rejected them until they were finally accepted at the Council of Chalcedon, which occurred at a late date after all the Apostles of Jesus Christ were all dead and the Christian descendants of the dispersion throughout the world were firmly in control. The Epistles of John had no connection with John the Apostle because both of them were written late after John had already died. At best, these two books were only written by students and followers of John the Apostle who used the name of their teacher and favorite apostle only to gain an acceptance of their writings, which was a common practice in that day. The use of the term “Anti-Christ” in Second John is not a prediction of the occurrence of a future individual, but it is a figurative description of an extant movement in the writers’ own time that was against Christ, His followers, believers, and the one true Church. The term Church was not used until the time of the Emperor Constantine, who accepted Christianity and made it a legal religion in the Roman Empire. Before Constantine, the “Church” was simply a rag-tag group of underground believers who struggled to keep their belief in Jesus Christ intact and pure. In order to do so, this rag-tag group of banned believers seated the Councils of Nicea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon in order to establish the true Canon drawn as best as they good from the true teachings of Jesus Christ and His Apostles. It was the Emperor Constantine, after he became a Christian, who established Christianity as the Roman Catholic Church, which, at that time included both the eastern and the western churches, that is the church universal. Although schisms occurred after Constantine causing the formation of the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Roman) as well as the later Protestant Reformation and its multiple schisms and splintered up churches, the Church of Jesus Christ is still the Universal Church, completely united in Christ, yet divided in polity and practice just as the world and its people are varied and divided. United we stand in Christ, yet divided in polity and worship practices.